lights on the path

Though he had always been a careful planner, life on the frontier had long ago convinced him of the fragility of plans. The truth was, most plans did fail, to one degree or another, for one reason or another. He had survived as a Ranger because he was quick to respond to what he had actually found, not because his planning was infallible.

To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space.

In my own stories about spiritual experience, just as in the stories I received as a child, the truth, if there is truth, is seen “through a glass, darkly.”3 To me, this means that no matter how deeply or widely we study, there is always more to be seen, and no one sees all that there is to see. I do not believe there is or ever has been anyone who

What a mystery the way things act on us, like secret messages just to you as you sit in the dark.

He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.

– Jean-Luc Godard

The sphere of our possible intellectual knowledge is thus strictly conditioned by the limits of our own personality. On this basis, not the ends of the earth, but the external termini of our own sensory nerves, are the termini of our explorations: and to "know oneself" is really to know one's universe.

Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.